Palm Sunday 2014

Valentine de Souza	Apr 13 (1 day ago)
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Palm Sunday

José Enrique Galarreta S.J.

Holy Week reconstructs in some way the last week in the mortal life of Jesus. According to this, Jesus would have entered Jerusalem on a Sunday. The entrance is presented as “messianic”, and Jesus becomes the symbol of the one waited for, so he climbs up to the Temple and purifies it of its abuses, showing himself as the real Lord of the Temple, to the real scandal of the priests. Jesus retires for the nights to Bethany or half the way to the garden of olives.

From Monday to Wednesday Jesus appears every morning in the Temple to teach; there the most fierce controversies with the Pharisees, the Sadducees and the scribes  take place. They determine the definitive break. The priests and the Elders decide his death and seek an occasion which the treason of Judas provides. On Thursday, Jesus enters incognito in Jerusalem and celebrates a farewell supper with his closest disciples. That same night he is arrested in the garden of Olives

He is condemned to death and on Friday is crucified. Saturday is the Great Sabbath, which coincides with the Paschal Feast. On Sunday at dawn, the women go to the Sepulcher, they find it empty and break the news. After that there follows a series of appearances of Jesus and the faith of the disciples in him will be born.

These events are celebrated liturgically in four feasts: Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter (The Vigil and Sunday)

It is important to remember that we are not simply remembering the historical events, but celebrating what they meant and continue to mean; and that this meaning is unitary : the whole celebration is directed to and reaches its peak in the Resurrection; without it all that precedes it is meaningless.

Mt 21, 1-11 Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

Is. 50, 4-7

Mt 26, 14 – 27,66. Where do you want us to prepare the Paschal meal?

They crucified two thieves with him.

Palm Sunday

The triumph of Jesus will be the cross.

Palm Sunday is the announcement of the Passion. The procession with the palms with its festive context cannot forget that the triumph of Christ is not a simple popular homage: Jesus triumphs on the cross. That will be his victory. It is victory over death, the complete fulfillment of his mission, of the will of the Father. This is introduced with a reading from Isaiah  which leaves no doubt as to the meaning of the celebration.

Isaiah 50, 4-7)

St. Paul to the Phillipians 2: 6-11

Themes and Contexts

The Song of the Servant in Isaiah

In this second book of Isaiah, called “the book of consolation”, there appears a character who has been called “The Servant of Yahweh”, in four canticles (Chs.42, 49, 50, 52). Called by God from the womb of his mother, he appears as a disciple whose hearing  God has opened, so that he can instruct all. His mission is accomplished without fanfare or external success, he is subjected to insults and contempt; he is betrayed by sinners, and is loaded with their sins, being made through his humiliation and sufferings salvation for all.

The Church has always seen in this personality a prophetic anticipation of the figure of Jesus, and represents a messianism  the opposite of that which was habitual in Israel: the regal, triumphant messianism  based on the model of David.

The text thus introduces us, quite correctly, to the reading of the Passion, so that we understand better the real meaning of the victory of Jesus.

THE LETTER TO THE PHILIPPIANS

The reading from St. Paul brings us close with greater depth to the theology of the cross, profoundly united to the theology of the Incarnation. Christ, stripped of his divine rank, made a man even unto death,  raised by God in the resurrection.

This text gives us the keys for a fundamental interpretation of the passion of Jesus: it is the ultimate consequence of the true human condition: human like us, hence subjected to being persecuted by evil and called to give his life as a definitive surrender; and that of a man full of the Spirit, whom that Spirit brings to face his passion and death with a fullness of surrender and meaning.

It is important to remember that the text is not writing history but developing  a theology. The history is not about a divine being stripping himself of divinity  and making himself like men. It’s about a man full of the Spirit of God. Theology is an interpretation of history, not the other way around.

THE READING OF THE PASSION

We read today the story of the Passion according to Matthew. We have to remember that the stories of the Passion  were those which, probably, were written down before any other: they  constituted the basis of the catechesis about Jesus, and posed the first problem for those who were going to believe in him: believe in a crucified man, to believe that in spite of his dishonorable death , rejected by the leaders of Israel, “God was with him.”

On the other hand, we must also remember  that they are the most “historical” accounts of the gospels. In most other instances, the meaning is more important than what happened. Here, the message is the event. It is the passion and death of Jesus, historical events, that constitute for us a Word of God.

REFLECTION

Palm Sunday can be celebrated simply as a day of victory, even though ephemeral, for Jesus.  It’s as if the whole of Israel, by a surprising  action of the Spirit, were to launch itself to the streets to proclaim him Messiah-King. This interpretation is very weak. In the first place, the event was much less spectacular than they would have us believe. A group of Galilean pilgrims at the Paschal feast in Jerusalem celebrate the presence of Jesus and proclaim him Messiah. The whole of Jerusalem is surprised, ask who he is, and they answer that he is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth...

And the triumph is modest, including its symbols, the small crowd, the children cheering.

Secondly, the triumph is very symbolic: Jesus does not enter as a powerful monarch, nor does he go to the temple to receive honors. Jesus does not play the part of the Davidic Messiah, but rather he resembles the servant of Isaiah; the look of suffering does not show on Sunday except in the opposition of the priests and of his enemies, the Pharisees, but will be seen definitively on Good Friday.  The signs are messianic, but not Davidic.  

All this leads us to consider the messianism of Jesus, and our own. Jesus is going to be victorious, but on the cross. He is not going to be victorious by destroying his enemies, by controlling the priests nor by winning the independence of Israel. He is going to be triumphant by reaching the end: by giving his life. The victory of Jesus is not like that of  Alexander the Great and not even like the victories of King David. The victory of Jesus is going to be the faith of his disciples, who will recognize him as The Lord, by his death and his resurrection. It is not the victory of the king; it is the victory of the grain of wheat that triumphs when it dies, because it will be fertile.

Thus, Palm Sunday introduces the right parameters for us to approach Holy Week by understanding and celebrating the central message of our faith, without allowing us to be drawn by tendencies which we would like very much, but which are corrected by Jesus himself. We would like a spectacular victory  hailed by crowds, but Jesus is not going to be victorious in this way; more still, he will be rejected, humiliated and apparently defeated by his enemies. We would like an equally spectacular resurrection; rather we would like to see what happens when his enemies rebuke him: “Come down from the cross and we will believe in you”, Jesus would come down from the cross miraculously and all would fall at his feet in adoration.  Our logic would demand that the Messiah should be received in triumph by his people, and that Jesus would enthrone the New Alliance on the pedestal of the Old. In short, we would like a Messiah on the model of King David, a spiritual and temporal monarch , a pontiff –king placed on the throne by God to put order among the nations.

In fact, this has been and is the temptation of the Church. All through history, the Church has tried to be the kingdom of God on earth in a juridical, external manner. And not only with respect to other powers of the world, kings and emperors subject to the Representative of Christ, but in its zeal to govern consciences, in attributing to itself powers presumably given by God himself to the leaders of the Church. Dignitaries of the Church have had the respect and appearance of princes, and even the celebration of the Eucharist has been designed with triumphant attributes, as a celebration of the universal recognition of the power of the divinity (and all its representatives), submitted to by all (including by people in whose spirit there is nothing of the Spirit of Jesus).

Palm Sunday cures us of all those imperial fantasies. Jesus is victorious because the Spirit leads him to giving his life. Jesus is not a King David who comes to build his kingdom by doing away with his enemies, but the grain of wheat which is buried and dies. The enemies of Jesus are not some people, but sins, that are in all people, including his own followers. The power of Jesus is imposition from outside, from above, but conversion from within, from below.

This is the symbolism of the purification of the Temple. In fact, Jesus is symbolically destroying the Temple. One of the most meaningful steps the first followers of Jesus took was to substitute the temple by a house, sacrifices by the breaking of bread. In the first communities priests and high priests disappeared, sumptuous rites and payment for worship. They were substituted by the fraternal community that lived by the Word and put everything in common. They did not try to impose themselves but to convert, they avoided religious and political  power and began to change society by changing consciences through faith in Jesus. And they were ready to suffer for all this and happy to be able to do so.

Later everything was changed. To belong to the church became a social advantage, the small seed changed not into a modest mustard shrub, but into a gigantic ostentatious baobab dogmatic and juridical tree, that issued anathemas and persecuted all those who opposed it. The domestic Eucharistic celebration gave way to worship in reconstructed temples, priests returned to rule over obedient and silent people and the power of God manifested is its High Priests dictated norms to the whole society. In short, the temple returned to hold its own over the house, sacrifice over the fraternal breaking of bread, spectacle over conversion.

The celebration of Palm Sunday can stress any of these two tendencies, so totally opposed. Our procession with palms and our Eucharist can be a victory of the Messiah-King or a proclamation  of Jesus on the  cross. We are therefore faced with a choice: the  victory of Jesus as we would like it to be, or the acceptance and celebration of the real victory of Jesus which is none other than death and resurrection.  

FOR OUR PRAYER

The celebration of Holy Week and of the Resurrection  supposes a greater challenge than we imagine. It’s possible that this celebration  is going to mean for us the following: Palm Sunday, the external victory, popular acclaim; Holy Thursday the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine; Good Friday, our compassion and sorrow for his sufferings; Easter Sunday, evidence of the divinity of Christ who rises from the dead by how own power.

But these days we are faced with much more, with the most essentials part of the message and person of Jesus. They ought to be for us days of cleansing our faith of all that our customs and our sins have gone on adding, days of approaching Jesus just as he is, not as we, because of our twisted conveniences have imagined him.

On Palm Sunday we do not celebrate the spectacular  victory of the Messiah who enters gloriously in his capital. We celebrate the heroism of Jesus who, knowing that his life was at stake, enters Jeerusalem publicly and cleanses the Temple thus provoking the definitive decision of the leaders: he must be done away with. As long as Jesus was content with the role of a discreet village prophet, far from Jerusalem, the affair would not have gone much further; to provoke the power of the priest and the great rabbis in their very temple, at the time of the Pasch, is an intolerable provocation.  But Jesus knows that that is his mission: to offere the Kingdom to the whole of Israel, publicly and “officially”, in the Temple and at the time of the Pasch. He nows it’s going to cost him his life, and he accepts the challenge.

On Holy Thursday we do not celebrate the Institution of the Sacrifice of the New Pasch. That is a jewish, regressive and sterile  reading . WE celebrate Jesus bread and wine for the life of the world. Neither do we celebrate the first supper of the Lord, but the last of the meals of Jesus with his disciples. Neither do we celebrate in anticipation the sacrifice of the cross, but the constant sacrifice of Jesus, his whole life understood as bread and wine for the life of the world.

On Good Friday we do not celebrate the cruel, expiatory  sacrifice by which God is placated by the calming aroma of the blood of his son, and forgives our sins. We celebrate the triumph of the grain of wheat, theconsequence of Jesus assuming his mission with all its consequences, and we celebrate above all the death of political/sacred  messianism. That is the kind that dies on the cross, the triumphant Messiah. Without the cross, the disciples would have continued to believe in Jesus as King of Israel. It is only when that Messiah dies on the cross can faith in the Servant who gives his life, rejected by sins, be born.

On Resurrection Sunday we do not  celebrate the spectacular victory of Christ over his historic enemies, but faith in the love of the Father, a love stronger than death and sin, manifested above all in Jesus, and able to manifest itself in each one of us.

The whole of Holy Week is therefore a song to the love of God in the fight against sin. The two things, sin and the love of God, can be seen spectacularly clear during this week. And that ought to be the object of oour contemplation.